This invention pertains to clustered computing systems and other clustered information handling systems and, more particularly, to reducing the power consumed by a clusters of redundant servers.
In order to meet the demands of heavily loaded Internet application services, providers of application services have turned to redundancy in order to increase the response time of the application service. Redundancy typically refers to the addition of one or more functionally identical servers to the application service. When a single physical server acts logically as a plurality of servers, the plurality of servers are generally referred to as virtual servers. When adding servers in a redundant server environment, the servers added can be physical or virtual.
The network's deployed in heavily loaded Internet application services typically contain a finite number of network nodes. At each node resides a server or a number of servers. Either the server or the number of servers can be virtual or physical servers or any combination of both.
Service Providers typically have a large number of nodes that may be allocated among multiple customers to provide application services at various points in time. Because the offered workload may vary over time, there will be times when the numbers of nodes in the facility exceed the number of nodes required to provide the service. This presents a problem to the service provider because the excess servers consume power and other resources. The servers which are inactive and remain powered-on not only consume more power but are also susceptible to derated reliability for those reliability components which correlate to total power-on time.